Author’s note:It now looks like the subject of this column,
the “top al-Qaeda commander” arrested in Pakistan, is
not Adam Gadahn: CBS News is reporting
that the original story was “false.” Instead, the man arrested has been tentatively
identified as Abu Yahya Mujahdeen al-Adam – also an American, this time from
Pennsylvania, who is said to be “close to Osama bin Laden.”

Oh, but don’t worry, “it is still the arrest of an important Taliban militant,”
a Pakistani security official assures us – and he’s an American. So, who is
this guy? Stay tuned for updates.

In the meantime, this column about Gadahn is still timely, as his recent
videos – and murky history – give us some insight into someone who certainly
qualifies as the oddest of al-Qaeda’s pantheon of terrorist leaders.

The news of Gadahn’s capture is barely an hour old as I write this, and already
the blogs are raising
the question of whether he should be put to death. Under normal circumstances,
having already been indicted
and charged
with treason by a federal grand jury in central California, his trial – if
the Pakistanis hand him over, that is – would probably take place somewhere
in this
vicinity. But with this administration, and this Justice Department, who
knows? They have been all over the map on this question, and at this point
nothing would surprise me.

You’ll recall Hillary Clinton’s disastrous sojourn to Pakistan, where she
insulted her hosts by practically accusing the authorities of hiding top al-Qaeda
figures. By the time we’re done with the saga of Adam Gadahn, however, I’ll
bet she and her confreres in the administration – especially in the Justice
Department – will wish the Pakistanis had let this one go. That’s because "Azzam"
presents a real legal, political, and strategic problem for President Obama.
Legally, Gadahn has a right to a trial in open court, but we aren’t dealing
with just any old defendant in this case. Gadahn has been functioning as al-Qaeda’s
chief propagandist since at least 2004, when the first of several videos featuring
him appeared. Articulate, informed, and prolific, Gadahn’s commentaries present
a clear uncompromising picture of Osama bin Laden’s view of the world. Putting
him on trial in an American courtroom will give Gadahn the spotlight he’s always
wanted, a perfect opportunity to play out his ideological and personal drama
on the world stage.

What we’re going to be hit with, rather shortly, is a slew of psycho-babbling
"cultural" commentary, riffing on the alleged "emptiness"
of the poor boy’s early life – raised on a goat ranch by his hippie-Christian-"off-the-grid"
father – and then parked with his paternal grandfather, Carl Pearlman, a prominent
urologist and member of the Anti-Defamation League board of directors, in Santa
Ana, California. His grandmother, Agnes
Branch Pearlman, editor of the Christian Family Chronicles, was
a genealogist.

From heavy metal to Islam was a strange
road to travel, but Gadahn took it: he signed up as a Muslim at a southern
California mosque, and fell in with a radical faction of younger types who
disdained the head of the mosque as a phony Muslim. Gadahn got into some sort
of contretemps with the moderate imam, physically assaulted him, and was arrested,
convicted, and sentenced to community work. He never did his time, however,
and instead went off to Pakistan, where he married an Afghan, became a father
– and showed up, years later, in his new guise as "Azzam the American,"
chief propagandist for al-Qaeda.

In the kind of coincidence that would get a fiction author in trouble, Gadahn
was arrested just as his latest video – a diatribe aimed at American Muslims,
praising Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Hassan, and urging the devout to take up arms
against the US – hit the Internet. A dramatic end to a dramatic saga – but
there are several aspects of this narrative that don’t make a whole lot of
sense.

To begin with, one of two radical Muslims who recruited Gadahn – Khalil Deek,
also an American citizen – has a very murky history. Aside from showing up
at the Islamic Society mosque where Gadahn first turned to Islam, Deek was
picked up in Pakistan in 1999, and extradited to Jordan, where he was wanted
for planning the bombing of tourist hotels. His arrest was hailed by
US officials and Deek was described as a top al-Qaeda leader, whose job it
was to encrypt al-Qaeda communications and run jihadists from Pakistan into
Afghanistan. In spite of his status as an American citizen, US embassy officials
in Amman ignored his case – and failed to intervene when he was inexplicably
released after being held for 17 months. Jordanian officials lamely attributed
his release to a lack of evidence, although he had supposedly cooperated in
deciphering some captured al-Qaeda documents.

In May, 2001, Deek showed up at the American consulate in Peshawar. As the
Orange County Weeklyreported
in 2004:

"That would have been a perfect opportunity for U.S. authorities to
question Deek about his involvement with al-Qaeda. Instead, family members
say, Deek was told to fill out an application and come back later. ‘They didn’t
even allow him to come into the building,’ one of Deek’s relatives said in
a recent interview. ‘They told him to fill out an application for a visa and
come back in four to six months.’

"That was four months before Sept. 11. Since then, the family member
said, ‘We have lost all contact with him and don’t know where he is.’"

His Wikipedia entry claims there are "reports" that he was killed,
and speculates that the killers may have been al-Qaeda, who may have been a
little pissed off that he had deciphered those documents while in jail – or
it may have been the Pakistanis. In any case, the extreme murkiness of his
exact status and whereabouts is ample cause to examine a bit more closely his
link to Gadahn.

According to several accounts of Gadahn’s conversion and recruitment to al-Qaeda,
both he and Deek worked for "Charity Without Borders," an al-Qaeda
front group that sent money to overseas jihadists. This outfit was headed up
by Hisham Diab, an immigrant from Egypt and a naturalized US citizen. Diab’s
fate – and even his exact identity – are even
murkier than the circumstances surrounding Deek.

In any case, he and Deek were "perfectionists" at forging phony
passports, and supposedly were in the process of making
one for Osama bin Laden when Diab’s wife accidentally washed Osama’s photo
which Diab had put in the pocket of his dirty clothes. In June, 2001, he disappeared
into Afghanistan, leaving his American wife and former associates (some of
whom are still
living in the US) behind.

What is interesting is how the US authorities have shown next to no interest
in questioning Deek, Diab, or anyone else connected with al-Qaeda’s southern
California cell. Yet these are the people who recruited Gadahn – himself an
awfully odd figure, whose sudden evolution from a nice Jewish boy into Osama
bin Laden’s Goebbels is just a little hard to take. As the Orange County
Weekly put it:

"If Khalil
Deek is such a dangerous man, why have U.S. officials passed up
at least three opportunities to interrogate the former Anaheim resident?

Why indeed….

When we speak of al-Qaeda, we are talking about a mystery wrapped in an enigma
and shrouded in a veil of murk. Shifting identities, faked deaths, and sudden
"resurrections" are the "norm" for this crowd, and especially
when we trace the path taken by Gadahn, the truth seems to fade farther into
the distance the more we pursue the connection. It took Diab’s wife years to
interest the FBI in her story – even after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade
Center, which her husband was directly involved in. The mastermind of that
bombing, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the "blind sheik," had been a
guest in her home. She called the FBI – and they hung up on her! "We’re
not interested in this," the woman who answered the phone told her.

To investigate the shadows that surround "Azzam the American" is
to slide down the rabbit hole with Alice: you wind up in an alternate universe
where nothing is quite what it seems. I don’t know about you, but something
about this whole fantastic narrative smells to high heaven. Whether we’ll ever
get to the bottom of it remains to be seen, but the upcoming trial of Adam
Gadahn – if indeed it is upcoming – may provide some real clues at last.

201202915613 Responseshttp%3A%2F%2Foriginal.antiwar.com%2Fjustin%2F2010%2F03%2F07%2Fthe-trial-of-azzam-the-american%2FThe+Trial+of+Azzam+the+American2010-03-08+06%3A00%3A42Justin+Raimondohttp%3A%2F%2Foriginal.antiwar.com%2F%3Fp%3D2012029156 to “The Trial of Azzam the American”

"When JUSTIN speakS of al-Qaeda, HE IS talking about a mystery wrapped in an enigma and shrouded in a veil of murk. "
Pssssssssst! Justin my good man,the term Al-Qaeda was conjured by CIA.
This week Alex Jones asked a question on FOX news–why is the media pushing 911 truthers as whackos? My question to Justin–why is he/Koshermedia pushing the CIA term CONSTANTLY –Open Toilet (al-Qaedia)?

To the moderator: Just as a matter of curtesy and curiosity would you consider informing me as to what you find offensive in my comments. I was undeer the imression that Antiwar's policies is not to limit free speech.

I too am starting to believe that Al-Qai'da is just a creation of the "intelligence" community, something to keep us up late at nights and causing us to grant carte-blanche to the authorities to tread on our civil rights, plunder the treasury and to continue to turn this country into a police state in a thousand other different ways.

At's this juncture, I expect we'd sooner find OBL sitting around a pool on a desert island…with Ameila Earhardt, JFK and Elvis…than in the mountins of AfPak.

Since when does the world's most secretive paramilitary organization make a marshmallow from California its chief of anything? It's almost as laughable as the idea that people in those lands who used to love America all of a sudden decided to hate us en masse, prompting their leaders to declare jihad against us for our materialism.

Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com, and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute. He is a contributing editor at The American Conservative, and writes a monthly column for Chronicles. He is the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement [Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993; Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2000], and An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard [Prometheus Books, 2000].